Unlocked Windows Phone 7 image shows Office, progress

The newly released update to the Windows Phone 7 development kit brings with …

The Windows Phone 7 developer kit was updated last week. The new version brought support for the RTM version of Visual Studio 2010, released mid-April, as well as a new, improved emulator image.

Just as with its predecessor, most of the features in the emulator image are locked down and inaccessible. And just as with its predecessor, enterprising individuals have figured out a way to unlock them. The new emulator image includes the Office Mobile 2010 capabilities shownrecently.

Office is accessible from the home screen

Poking around, it's fair to say that Office Mobile 2010 doesn't actually do very much. Then again, it's not really supposed to. It can load Excel, Word, and PowerPoint documents, make basic edits to them (typing into Word, altering numbers in Excel, reordering slides in PowerPoint), and add annotations to them. They can then be saved, either locally or to SharePoint, or e-mailed.

Spreadsheet top half, annotation bottom half

Word is pretty rudimentary

This is probably about the right amount of complexity for Office on a phone; reading documents and annotating them to make proper changes once back in the office is appropriate to the limited capabilities of a phone, whereas full-on document creation wouldn't be (that's not to say that new documents can't be created in Office Mobile—they can, it's just not especially useful). The close integration, especially with SharePoint, makes sharing of annotated documents or reading new ones simple and effective.

I expect OneNote will be the most useful part of the suite

The most developed, capable application is the one that makes most sense on a phone: note-taking software OneNote. In addition to SharePoint integration, OneNote also offers syncing with Windows Live (another reason why Windows Live IDs will be compulsory on Windows Phone). Notes can be text, of course, but can also include embedded audio and pictures.

One thing that is clear from using this build is that this is all still very new software, with some way to go before it's even beta quality. After using the phone emulator for a few minutes I started seeing all sorts of graphical corruption, with portions of the screen no longer being drawn properly. Internet Explorer also appeared to hang and stop responding to input.

There's also still a long way to go on the software development front. The lack of copy-and-paste and multitasking are at this point well-known. Less widely known are some of the other deficiencies. Developers will eventually be able to integrate applications into the hubs—the centralized, unified user interfaces for contacts, games, audio/video, and photos—but indications are that this capability won't be in version one.

Further, and perhaps even more troubling, there's as yet no standard API for implementing the "Pivot" or "Panoramic" style user interfaces—the sideways-scrolling UIs used throughout the Windows Phone platform, and fundamental to its overall aesthetic. Though developers can, and indeed are, inventing their ownsolutions, given the importance of look-and-feel, third-party implementations that each have slightly different behavior is not ideal.

These gaps should all be filled sooner or later, although slightly worryingly, the company has not confirmed that such capabilities will be introduced in time for launch. The software is certainly taking shape, but Microsoft will need to get its skates on if it wants to deliver a version one release that's both rock solid and a rich development platform.